More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Robin’s mind was oddly blank, as it had been sometimes at the end of a particularly fiendish examination, as if he’d scooped out its worthwhile contents with his fingers and smeared them grimly onto the page. The last time he’d felt this way was when he found out that his parents were dead. Instead of surprise, this. An exhausted, wrung-out space.
“Unbusheling?” “We are man’s marvellous light? Oh, no, you wouldn’t—the English slang’s biblical, obviously, and the French say déclipser. Their idea of a pun. In Punjabi it’s got nothing to do with light, it’s either a snakeskin being shed or the tide going out, depending on where you are—” “Stop,” said Robin. This really was like being back at university. “I beg you, Miss Morrissey. Pretend I’m very stupid. Small words.” “Unbusheling. A revelation of magic.” Miss Morrissey looked apologetic. “Perhaps I’ll fetch that tea?” “Tea,” said Robin with relief. “Just the thing.”
He was in the mood to not talk with anyone and, as sometimes happened, felt perversely like surrounding himself with people to not-talk to.
Edwin’s collection of small enjoyments was carefully cultivated. When he exhaled his worry he imagined it going up in the snap of the fire. He thought about the meticulous cogs of the Gatlings’ clock, and the particular hazel of Sir Robert Blyth’s eyes.
Edwin had no idea what he ached for, no real sense of the shape of his ideal future. He only knew that if every day he made himself a little bit better—if he worked harder, if he learned more, more than anyone else—he might find it.
“Crackpots and far too much paper,” said Blyth. He directed the smile at Miss Morrissey, but he’d started it—perhaps by mistake—when he was looking at Edwin, and it was like being caught in the last rays of sunset. “Sounds like government work to me.”
“We are man’s marvellous light / We hold the gifts of the dawn / From those now passed and gone / And carry them into the night.”
“All right. Books are at least somewhat less likely to hurl insults at one,” he said. “It is one of their major appeals,” said Courcey, and Robin found himself unexpectedly smiling.
Robin had nothing at all against the country, but could never shake the impression that it would rather everyone buggered off to town and let it administer itself back into wilderness.
Robin felt like his entire face was a question. It must have been; Edwin looked at him and began at once to answer it.
“Remind me not to make an enemy of you, Edwin Courcey,” he said, smiling to show he meant no sting. “I think yours is probably the kind of brain that could run a country.” Edwin wasn’t smiling, but something about the way he ducked his head suggested that he was pleased, and not sure how to handle being pleased.
“I … think so.” “It’s most likely a coincidence. This is just a story.” “Magic is just a story,” said Robin. “If magic exists then surely the fae do. Or did.”
How many frights made a pattern? How many coincidences made a plot?
This was so deeply awkward. Usually one simply knew, when acquaintanceship was turning to friendship. It wasn’t the kind of thing men discussed at length.
You look like a Turner painting and I want to learn your textures with my fingertips. You are the most fascinating thing in this beautiful house. I’d like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.
“Wait, wait,” he said, fumbling after the mental shape of it. “You imbued the living plants? And you’ve never had to re-do it? How is that possible?” “I believe I just told you,” she said, schoolmarmish. “Start when life starts. Beginnings and endings are powerful. Liminal states. You can create profound change if you slip in through the gaps.” “Spin it from twigs,” Robin said, suddenly. “Like the saying? Like an orchard?”
Then Edwin spoke in a tumbling rush. “I, Edwin John Courcey, claim the witnessed inheritance of the magicians of Britain, and I make blood-pledge for myself and my heirs with”—another incredulous, bitten-back sound—“as much of this land as will have me, even if it’s only these few fucking square yards. Mine to tend and mine to mend, and mine the—the pull and the natural right.” He turned his head to look at Robin. He looked ghostly, ghastly. “This man is a guest. He has no magic. He means you no harm.”
The easy vulnerability of the admission startled Edwin. But of course Robin was brave in this, as he was brave in everything else. Of course he’d throw himself that open without a second thought. If someone tried to mock him for what he wanted he’d probably just laugh.
Edwin knew his weaknesses as old friends, and here was the bare bones of them: he’d never been any good at keeping himself contained, in bed. He’d years of practice holding himself back behind shields raised against insult or injury, but desire was another matter. His body betrayed him when it wanted something, and now it wanted everything.
He had enough energy to glare at the guidelight, but not nearly enough to launch into an explanation of his vast and ludicrous ignorance on the usual sequelae when one was having fantastic sex in a magical estate that one was wearing like an ill-fitting new suit.
And admission, even in his own head: I am nothing like you, and yet I feel more myself with you.
“I don’t want to intrude.” “You’re not. You can’t. It’s extremely irritating.” Edwin stepped close, very close indeed. “What’s irritating?” Edwin said, “Every time you touch me it’s exactly what I want.”
It was the way he felt watching Edwin read; it was the feeling he had every time his eyes sought Edwin in a room and landed on any angle of the man’s face, any movement of those delicate fingers: There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.
It didn’t take long to become so accustomed to something that you could describe the exact shape of its absence.
It felt like standing in the sculpture hall of the British Museum with the weight of history rising up and pressing in on all sides, almost brutal in its beauty. The world was larger than he’d thought.
“And we are but feeble women,” said Miss Morrissey. “Woe.” “Your sister is a magician,” Robin said, pointing out what seemed the largest hole in this story. “Woe,” said Mrs. Kaur firmly, and Robin recalled what Miss Morrissey had said about the assumptions made by men.
For a very long time, he thought, he would remember the look that came over Walt’s face when Walt realised that he had won this battle—for his cause, for his passion project—but had lost every scrap of his leverage over Robin, and also lost his ability to threaten Edwin. Ever again. It was a look that meant Walt was seeing something shatter, and what was shattering was the story. The story about the relationship between the Courcey brothers, a story that Walt had built and Edwin had always believed he had no choice but to inhabit. Now it was in pieces.
Robin wanted to make a leather-bound book of his belief and hand it to Edwin, make him read it over and over until Edwin could look in a mirror and see something of what Robin saw.
“You could still hurt me,” he said. “But I do think you’d somehow manage to tear your own arm off before you did it on purpose.” His tone walked a tightrope between disapproval and wonder. “And I’m sick to death of being afraid, and I want you. Enough to risk it. More than enough. You make me feel like something—extraordinary.”
Edwin, who’d learned to hide the things he wanted so completely that he almost didn’t let himself want them at all.
Firstly, a book about the responsibility we owe to the places we live would be incomplete without the acknowledgment that I wrote most of these words on unceded Ngunnawal country, where the traditional owners have been the land’s caretakers for many thousands of years.
To all the writers who came before me and created the stories that were my building blocks, the books that held me together and made me strive to do better. A fond and grateful toast to the memories of Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Georgette Heyer, Joan Aiken, P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Dunnett, and Dorothy L. Sayers. And to my contemporaries in SFF, who are making the genre wider and deeper and richer and weirder and queerer: I’m thrilled and honoured to be working at the same time as you, in the same spaces as you.
